'Borderlands' review: Everything you hated from the games, with nothing you liked
Reviewed by a gamer: Eli Roth's take on the popular "Borderlands" video game series is woefully out of touch with things such as "comedy" and "action."
Everything about Eli Roth's Borderlands feels at least a decade out of time. From a sense of humor plucked straight out of Reddit circa 2011 to a cast made up of actors who are inexplicably decades older than the characters they portray, every second left me — a fan of the first two games in this franchise — wondering how and why the hell it exists in 2024.
With an ensemble cast featuring Academy Award–winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis, along with comedy stars Kevin Hart and Jack Black, plus a director whose name is recognizable (if nothing else), Borderlands theoretically brings a level of prestige that many other video game adaptations haven't had. But theory and practice are two different things, and when it comes to the latter, Borderlands is an adaptation that's equal parts miserable and unnecessary.
Put a different way: Sometimes a video game should stay a video game.
What is Borderlands about?
Our journey begins with the generic, straight-man soldier Roland (Hart) joining forces with the unstable juggernaut Krieg (Florian Munteanu, a German boxer who I just learned also goes by "Big Nasty") to rescue a very special young woman named Tina (Barbie's Ariana Greenblatt) from a prison cell on an exploding space station. The trio makes their way down to the rough desert planet of Pandora, known for its lawless wastes full of would-be treasure hunters searching for a rumored ancient alien vault that has a special connection to Tina.
It turns out that Tina is the daughter of the villainous corporate overlord Atlas (Édgar Ramírez), whose elite Crimson Lance paramilitary squad previously employed Roland. Atlas employs the merciless bounty hunter Lilith (Blanchett) to track down Tina and bring her back into his clutches. But maybe 15 minutes of screen time later, Lilith teams up with Roland, Krieg, and Tina to find the vault, hoping to use what is inside to stop Atlas' plan for dominance.
Oh, and Jack Black is here lending his voice as Claptrap, the "lovable" robot who more or less acts as the franchise's mascot. He is very annoying, which is accurate to the games, I suppose.
Please just shut up for two minutes.
Narratively speaking, Borderlands is a bit of an odd amalgamation of the first two games. Roland and Lilith hail from the first game, while Krieg and Tina debuted in its sequel. Atlas is an original character for the film who sort of fills the same "evil murder CEO" role as Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2, but with all the charisma of a guy hosting an airline safety video. I'd estimate that he's on screen for a total of 10 minutes, at most.
The measly bits of plot and character development that do exist in Borderlands are only in service of justifying aggravating, banter-filled exchanges in between action sequences. In this respect, Borderlands is accurate to the source material; the big joke among every gamer I know is that you should play the games with the dialogue muted.
Its mercifully short 102-minute runtime somehow puts Borderlands at a disadvantage, because absolutely nothing is given time to breathe. Nearly every joke consists of hastily farted-out one-liners that are shockingly easy to miss at times, though I would argue you're not really missing anything. One of the only gags that’s given any time to shine is an uncomfortably long shot of Claptrap pooping bullets.
This is a movie that thinks "badonkadonk," a term that has been in the pop culture lexicon for at least 22 years, is a really funny thing to say in 2024. According to Borderlands, the most hilarious and twisted thing in the world is a teenage girl who uses curse words and shoots people with guns. That was kind of funny when I was 14 and Kick-Ass was in theaters, but not anymore.
I can tell you that I chuckled precisely once during the entire film, when the nearly mute Krieg belts out a spirited "THANK YOU!" after being called handsome. It's one of the only lines delivered with sincere enthusiasm, and I appreciated that.
Borderlands suffers, above all else, from an extreme lack of silence. Every moment of it is jacked up to 11 without so much as a brief pause, almost as if Roth knew that letting audiences think for a second or two about what they just heard might prompt them to get up and do anything else with their lives. By the end, I badly wished everyone would just shut the hell up.
I didn't know Cate Blanchett could be bad.
It's not easy for any actor to save a script that might qualify as a war crime, but nobody in Borderlands is trying that hard to do so. Hart is strangely cast as a comedy straight man, only rarely doing the exuberant, exasperated fast-talking that has long been his signature. Curtis, to her credit, brings enjoyable quirky aunt vibes as the crew's archaeologist Tannis, but her character is such an afterthought that it doesn't really matter.
Black's high-pitched wailing as Claptrap is at least faithful to the games, if not very fun to listen to. Munteanu doesn't have to do much other than be burly and occasionally grunt out monosyllabic words as Krieg, who is honestly my favorite character because he barely talks.
Blanchett's turn as Lilith deserves special mention here, though, because it's the first time I've ever seen her phone in such a terrible performance. She probably has the most dialogue in the movie, and almost none of it is delivered in a convincing manner. Acting is more than just line delivery, of course, but all of her reads are so wooden and stilted that it's genuinely distracting from the start.
I get it. If I were an accomplished thespian, I wouldn't feel excited about this material either. It doesn't make for a great viewing experience though. While this doesn’t necessarily impact their performances, I'll also point out that Blanchett, Hart, and especially Curtis are all substantially older than the characters they're playing are in the games. Everyone feels out of place.
The moment when I realized what I was in for was when Borderlands made it clear that Greenblatt's Tiny Tina is the most important character in the story. If you don’t know, Tiny Tina is famously one of the most obnoxious characters in video game history. Her whole schtick in the games is "little girl who loves explosives and speaks in AAVE," and that's kept largely intact here.
To be fair, it isn't really Greenblatt's fault that Tiny Tina is as exasperating as she is. The material demands that she be really brash and abrasive, while also delivering lines that would make Shakespeare regret his contributions to this English language. I don’t hold Tiny Tina's presence in this movie against Greenblatt, but rather against the people who created the character in 2012 in the first place.
Furio-sucks
The Borderlands games are primarily about shooting guns, so naturally, the Borderlands movie has a bunch of action sequences in it. None of them are the slightest bit novel or interesting. Not one.
Maddeningly, the film is rated PG-13 despite the games very much warranting an R rating. This means any opportunities for the kinds of fun, nonsensical violence you see in the games are neutered before they can even begin. Every gunfight consists of shots of our heroes trying to look cool while shooting guns, interspersed with shots of literally faceless and nameless bandits just sorta bloodlessly falling over.
There's no physicality or kineticism to these scenes, as you might see in a competent action movie like John Wick. The movie's few pathetic attempts at interesting fight choreography are obscured by poor lighting or frantic cuts. There is one single moment where it seems like Lilith might kill a bad guy in the way that would get people to jump out of their seats in a better movie, but you can't actually see it because it's in the middle of a flashing strobe light sequence, for no apparent reason.
Possibly the most confusing decision Roth made was completely leaving out the weird guns that permeate the Borderlands games. One of the big selling points from the first game onward was that you can find guns that turn into throwable grenades when they run out of ammo, or release a human scream when you fire, or coat enemies in acid, or a million other fun variables. Some of the guns in the film look unusual, but they all just fire regular bullets. Come on!
Borderlands' greatest sin as an action movie might be the fact that its setting is extremely reminiscent of Mad Max, and its late-summer release is just a couple of months after the tremendous Furiosa's Cannes premiere. Tossing aside the fact that Furiosa is a prodigious and elegiac meditation on actual themes, it's also a highly accomplished car chase movie that was directed with a deft hand by genre master George Miller.
Eli Roth is not George Miller, and Borderlands is not Furiosa. There's one major car chase scene in the first half of the film that is so embarrassing in comparison to Furiosa (or Fury Road, or any other Mad Max movie) that I would not have let it see the light of day were I Eli Roth. It's a mess of genuinely awful-looking CGI vomit, with green-screen shots so obviously fake that you could almost convince me they were a bit, if only they appeared in a more clever movie.
There's no sense of danger in these sequences. Plus, it’s impossible to tell where any vehicles are in relation to other vehicles, and the whole thing ends with the heroes being covered in worm piss. In that moment, the audience can relate.
The lesson here is that if George Miller is about to release another masterpiece, maybe get your own crappy desert action movie well out of the way so nobody thinks to compare the two.
A Borderlands movie came 10 years too late.
While developer Gearbox has continued making Borderlands games over the last decade (with great financial success), I and many of my gaming cohorts have long felt that its time to shine ended somewhere around 2014.
In 2009, the first game stood out because it melded role-playing mechanics with first-person shooting that felt good — something that hadn't really been done before at that scale. It also had a unique art style and a sense of humor, both of which went a long way in an era dominated by bland Call of Duty knock-offs. The 2012 sequel was more of the same, but the formula was still worthwhile, and I had a fun time with it. However, my sense of humor evolved well past the dated pop culture and internet meme references that plagued those games. And plenty of other RPG/shooter hybrids came out in the last decade that negated the uniqueness of Borderlands.
It's unbelievably vexing, then, that anyone decided to make Borderlands into a movie in the 2020s. Game adaptations always, by necessity, lose the kinds of player-driven interactivity that make video games, well, video games. Sometimes the game in question has enough going for it to cover for that, but Borderlands does not. It is a series that made sense at a specific point in time entirely due to the circumstances surrounding it.
When you remove the fun co-op gunplay and build the whole thing out of irritating jokes, you get one of the worst movies I've seen in years. Congratulations to all involved for somehow making a movie that feels way too much like Borderlands without being very much like Borderlands in any of the ways that matter at all.